Suite 415: Five out of five for drag brunch at Harry Denton’s Starlight Room

By Greg Zeman
The Guardsman

There are plenty of hotels in the Bay Area and I’ve been known to eat, drink and sleep it off in the best and worst of them. I’ve found some hidden gems in a few as well as some rocks to avoid. All this entertainment is available to hotel guests and visitors alike and you don’t have to be an obnoxious out-of-towner to enjoy it.

Top booking
The Sunday’s A Drag brunch and variety show is the costume ruby inside the exquisitely gaudy jewel-box that is Harry Denton’s Starlight Room. The lavishly decorated penthouse-level lounge literally towers above the city at the top of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, 21 floors above the street below.

What’ll it cost, man?
If you stick to the juice and coffee that comes with the brunch your cost shouldn’t exceed $45, but if you want to have as much fun as I did you’ll need to bring some friends and some extra cash. While you don’t have to be 21 to attend the show, the bar is definitely fully stocked, it is definitely available throughout the show and, no, it is definitely not cheap.

The brunch itself is surprisingly good — I’m always surprised when something is good — and is available for about an hour before the show and 30 minutes into it. Sure, they’ll carve prime rib for you, but I was sold as soon as I saw lox and capers.
But enough about the food, you came to see drag queens; and you will.

“The uniforms are fabulous”
There are two kinds of drag queen: the scary-gym-teacher-in-a-tutu dress/J. Edgar Hoover kind and the kind that looks like something you’d draw in prison to trade for smokes.

At Sunday’s A Drag you’ll see both of these and more including “the oldest female impersonator alive in captivity,” Gina Lotavina; the impossibly proportioned Cassandra Cass, who looks like a transgender Disney princess; and Beyonce was there too.

She told me she really was Beyonce and after watching her do the “Single Ladies” dance, I believe her.

The host of the show was Hollatta Tymes — get it? — a broad-shouldered redhead who, in her own words, is “pretty if you have Vaseline on your contacts and you squint.” She was the only one who didn’t just lip-sync but truly sang, and baritone at that.

“It’s just like any job,” Tymes said after the show, “It has its ups and downs. It’s just a different uniform. Granted, the uniforms are fabulous.”

Tymes delighted the audience with witty, Jager-fueled banter, dozens of lightning-quick costume changes and her spot-on impersonation of Reba McEntire.

Verdict
The appeal of getting sauced and watching grown men play dress-up like little girls is sort of like the appeal of just getting sauced: if it has to be explained, you probably won’t enjoy it.